Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

What can a search engine possibly compute anything other than the ridiculous 2^2^2^2...?

Who would type that question to a search engine anyway? No, no, Microsoft is confused, you use Mathematica 7.0 for that kind of computation.

The best today's idiotic search engines could possibly hope to do is to add/subtract some numbers, provide unit/currency conversions and that's all. Google is already doing all that.

Unless Bing servers are some clever cousins of HAL, adding some funky math skills to them won't do a bit of a difference. It's a loooong shot before the search engine actually gathers unrelated information and connects it to the actual query, doing some useful computation in between.

In most cases, a 9-char password is some 96 times (number of printable characters) harder than an 8-char password,

I'd believe 30 -40, but not 96. Most people are going to use letters and a small number of punctuation, and I'd wager that testing half of that will get you 90% of the possible choices. If it's just english words, I'll go with 16 as the multiplier, just given the info content of most english.

It can be fairly easily, at least here in the US. $1000 retail value within 6mo (so for example a "so-and-so discography" or "best of <genre>" torrent would probably qualify), or if you're trying to make money, or if it's pre-release.

Graphene has been studied extensively in the last few years. Carbon Nanotubes were on the rise (which are just rolled up sheets of single layer graphite) but the current difficulties to manipulate those to create devices staggered their advance. Graphene ( or Graphite for that matter) is a little easier to manage because it's like a 2 -D sheet and it can be laid/printed off a substrate more easily.

The current major problem of graphene is the lack of a sizable band-gap which is typically required for semiconductor modulation. We may see a breakthrough in the following years if people figure out a way to overcome this barrier.

Just to give an idea for us to see the colossal difference between the 'everyday experience' and the atomic world.

There's really no difference between Hydrogen (Z=1) and Ununoctium (Z=118) when you peek at them from a dimension that is 10 billion times (say the inter-atomic distance is about 1 Angstroms and we live in the meters range) larger than those.

CWmike writes "Researchers at Rice University have demonstrated a new data storage medium made out of a layer of graphite only 10 atoms thick. The technology could potentially provide many times the capacity of current flash memory and withstand temperatures of 200 degrees Celsius and radiation that would make solid-state disk memory disintegrate. 'Though we grow it from the vapor phase, this material [graphene] is just like graphite in a pencil. You slide these right off the end of your pencil onto paper. If you were to place Scotch tape over it and pull up, you can sometimes pull up as small as one sheet of graphene. It is a little under 1 nanometer thick,' Professor James Tour said."

mcgrew writes "The question of how we loveless nerds managed to not be bred out of the species genome may have been answered. According to New Scientist, we have better sperm. According to the article, men who scored high on a battery of intelligence tests boasted high counts of healthy sperm, while low scorers tended to have fewer and more sickly little guys. ... Though the connections between brains and sperm were 'not awesome, they're there and highly significant.' All things held equal, good sperm and good brains go together." Don't start gloating yet. Another recent study found that the gene that makes you good at Halo also makes you a premature ejaculator. A study of 200 Dutch men found that those with a premature ejaculation problem all had a version of a gene that controls the release of serotonin. These men seem to "have very quick reflexes. They may be excellent at playing tennis or computer games." Remember, if you smoke after sex you're doing it too fast.

Dekortage writes "According to the latest ComScore rankings, YouTube's search traffic for August surpassed Yahoo's. The latter dropped roughly 5% in traffic from July. Among other things, this means that Google now owns both of the top two search engines. AdAge further speculates on Google's experimental 'promoted videos' cost-per-click advertising on YouTube, suggesting the obvious: more money."

Your efforts of constantly showing it as simple as the writing a book-demanding money example are insufficient. It's just looking at the problem at a narrow angle, and it's, to me, being an ethical pussy.

You are claiming that our crusade against the big companies hurt the artists as well, huh? Oh, I am sorry to hear that but you are missing this : I am not hurting someone who has written a pathetic e-book and who tries to earn a few bucks by the help of a big company through that. Because he's not very popular in the first place. And as you might guess, unpopular information is uncommon on the internet. What's really common is "wildly popular" information. And most importantly, you can't claim that you should make money for your idea 25 years. You must be kidding me. So you would make millions of dollars because you come up with a mediocre idea under a grand company name? You can't do that. Get used to the idea.

Can't you really see the correlation between big companies (or super-famous artist, take Metallica-Napster conflict for example) and high download rates ?

We are really not hurting small business, because I (and a couple hundred million people who think like me) don't care about that work in the first place! A very few of us might be interested in your e-book (for which you've spent the last three years of your life) and that really won't hurt you. If you really get to be a famous guy and that your idea is really unique, then don't worry. You'll get your share. It'll just not be some imaginary number you are dreaming of. You'll get what you deserve.

I am still paying for books I like in the bookstore. I am just not paying for Metallica. They are already rich. And ironically, they are the biggest pussies in this world.

About that idea of reaching the artists and paying for them... That falls under the same terittory I've just described. If you are big enough to be taken care of a big-daddy company, your work will be ripped, shared and mercilessly freeloaded. Sorry about that. We are not killing you. You won't starve.

And that average guy won't be hit as much as you think. Try a rapidshare (or torrent) search on a very specific book. You can't reach it. IF you reach it, stop worrying.

Good luck with your absolute thinking. That doesn't help much in life. There are gray zones. Beware of that.